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Consistency enhances the user experience. By utilizing a component library, designers have the building blocks they need to create consistent and effective work flows. Crucial for large teams working in different areas of the product.
By providing pre-defined design patterns, components, and guidelines, a design system accelerates the design and development process. Teams can reuse existing elements, reducing the need to reinvent the wheel for each project.
As a company expands and develops more products, maintaining a unified design becomes increasingly challenging. Leveraging a design system early on will aid in establishing new brands and aligning teams more swiftly.
A design system fosters collaboration between design, development, and management teams. It establishes a shared vocabulary and understanding, making communication more efficient and reducing misunderstandings.
When design and development teams efficiently utilize a design system to access pre-defined UI elements and guidelines, they can dedicate more time to innovation and tackling unique challenges, thereby speeding up the development process.
A design system enforces design standards, reducing the likelihood of design errors and inconsistencies that could negatively impact the user experience and reduces the time spent running QA sessions between design and development teams.
We conduct a thorough evaluation of existing design components, patterns, and user interactions. This process helps identify inconsistencies, redundancies, and opportunities for improvement. This process also helps us gain the knowledge we need about all the functionalities of your product.
Before we start defining styles, we take some time to explore different ways the brand could be applied to the product and the design system based on created or provided brand guidelines. Typically, we showcase options based on how much brand volume or personality we want to turn up in the design system. Due to how we build design systems, we can start this process and simultaneously create the foundational styles and components.
While working through the discovery process, we lay the groundwork for the foundational styles. By utilizing design tokens, we can make any significant changes quickly due to any pivots that may arise during discovery.
Once foundational styles are in place, we create components using atomic design principles. We consider alignment with code, ease of maintenance, and consumer user experience. We prioritize creating flexible design systems that can grow and scale alongside the company.
We want to empower all teams to feel comfortable and confident using the design system, whether it's for products or marketing campaigns. We collaborate with teams to decide on the best tooling for where this source of truth should live to make it accessible and understandable.
Once we've completed version 1 of the design system, our team can help rebuild existing products on various platforms and themes using the new design system. We often take this opportunity to help teach and train in-house designers on the best UX patterns and local component creation.
Lastly, we prepare all our files for handoff. We typically design within your Figma organization for a seamless handoff. Teams are already utilizing the design system and we've tackled all the training needed through documentation. Even after handoff, our team is easily accessible through our connect slack channels to answer any lingering questions or issues that may arise.
We conduct a thorough evaluation of existing design components, patterns, and user interactions. This process helps identify inconsistencies, redundancies, and opportunities for improvement. This process also helps us ramp up to your product functionality.
Before we start defining styles, we take time to explore different ways the brand could be applied to the product and the design system based on created or provided brand guidelines. Typically, we showcase options illustrating a spectrum of brand volume or personality we want to turn up in the design system. Due to how we build design systems, we can start this process and simultaneously create the foundational styles and components.
While working through the discovery process, we lay the groundwork for the foundational styles. By utilizing design tokens, we can make any significant changes quickly due to any pivots that may arise during discovery.
Once foundational styles are in place, we create components using atomic design principles. We consider alignment with code, ease of maintenance, and consumer user experience. We prioritize creating flexible design systems that can grow and scale alongside the company.
We want to empower all teams to feel comfortable and confident using the design system, whether it's for products or marketing campaigns. We collaborate with teams to decide on the best tooling for where this source of truth should live to make it accessible and understandable.
Once we've completed version 1 of the design system, our team can help rebuild existing products on various platforms and themes using the new design system. We often take this opportunity to help teach and train in-house designers on the best UX patterns and local component creation.
Lastly, we prepare all our files for handoff. We typically design within your Figma organization for a seamless handoff. Teams are already utilizing the design system and we've tackled all the training needed through documentation. Even after handoff, our team is easily accessible through our connect slack channels to answer any lingering questions or issues that may arise.
We collaborate with engineering teams to define a token structure that works best for them. By using a token structure you can make one edit at the semantic level and have the everything referencing that token update instantly.
Another way you could describe a design token is simply a design decision. These design decisions end up shaping the foundational visual styles for the design system that can be used across the entire company, product and marketing teams can benefit from a single design system.
We execute variations of this strategy based on each team's needs, but below is a simplified example of how we approach atomic design principles. This strategy reduces the number of variants needed per component, reducing memory consumption, making components easy to use, pinpointing and fixing any potential bugs faster, and giving teams the flexibility they need to build out new features
The most basic components that are used in combination to make up all other components in the design system. They come in a wide range of styles and needed variants to make those more complex components much more flexible.
Molecule components are made up of a combination of atomic components. This allows consumers to do things like adjust size easily via the nested components. This strategy allows for easier maintenance and keeps file sizes down.
Organisms are made when you start to combine a mix of atomic and molecular components that are commonly used together to create a new component.
A design system is meaningless if no one knows how to use it. We provide all our design system clients with thorough documentation covering token usage, foundational styles, component usage, structure, and redlining. Live training workshops and open office hours are set to help teams transition into using a design system. Training videos are created that consumers can refer back to that walk them through anything they need to use the system successfully.
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